Diary Of A Dead Artist

The 2013 summer, in Xi-an, China and Croatia I made performances picking up from a series of songs recorded in the private studio or home without rehearsals.

I felt the increasing self conscious and uncomfortable position I had been thrust upon. It was a position that was increasingly perplexed to be given official recognition as a recipient of an award conferred by the state that centralized decision making on various aspects of our social and individual decorum . At the beginning, I did not take it seriously to reactions that should had alerted me such as one especially coming from a Council officer, once an artist and now serving as Gatekeeper, if not propaganda manager who blatantly said: "that is the death of an artist!" when I told him how I had accepted the award.

The internal dialogue I had made me realize that his remark was more than a cursory cliché in the contexts of where I stand. For a good ten years just before that having to work under the penalized or ostracization by default whereby performance art had been seen in negative perspective due to a ban on funding by the National Arts Council. The award given to me after ten years of denial gave confused signals that often led to misunderstanding or even suspicious where I stood as an artist. Added to how ours is a one party government that centralizes most decisions in close direct relationships to the state institutions and statutory boards including those that made policies on art and culture.

These performances not only highlight the need for autonomy of cultural institutions but also question the contradictions in the management and decision making of cultural and social directions in a country that proclaims to democratic processes and yet desperately hold on to uneven authoritarian methods of engineering consent and social conformity of cultural development.

In the first two performances of this series I had made various actions while playing the songs pre-recorded as well as live interventions improvised music. These were done as if the recorded songs served an archival documentation of the spirit made flesh. I become a ghost singing out lamentations knowingly all too well that none of it could actually be heard in the real world that was still alive.

After having recorded the songs I performed actions based on them twice. However the seasons came and went. They say time heals all wounds. Perhaps if there were wounds to heal. What I experienced was pain that did not end in death. Pain with no apparent cause but hidden perhaps like fault-lines ready to quake without warning. Memory being sidestepped or missed out by the guardians of history mesmerized by smart wares of ingenious designs and mindless games that eat away our busy indulgences numbing our fear of boredom with inconsequent games of matrix wasted pleasures. Hastening us to move on, get ahead into a progressive improved state. Gatekeepers are put in place seemingly sympathetic to the poets and artists but in fact practice authoritarian nepotistic judgements to keep out the measures that reveals or agitates the un-levelled playing grounds or attempt in uncovering identity of dictators behind their cosmetic anarchic vanities. In the hurried pace of racing toward a better tomorrow our errors are swept under luxurious carpets of fake stability and aberrations of comfort and security in the super fancy decor and surrealistic architecture disguise the same gilded cage of global capitalistic societies pretending to be the accomplished utopias or paradise on earth as promised in our ideal beginning and birth of a yet unfulfilled vision of just society and harmonious community.